Lauren Boebert
Crash! Boom! Thud!
Rep. Lauren Boebert’s elevator joke (watch it below) fell down the shaft and landed with a sickening bang.
The video leaked (helpful hint: they always do). Now, after getting caught, Boebert (R-CO) is scrambling to apologize to the Muslim congresswoman she insinuated is a terrorist and to the Muslim community she insinuated by extension is a hotbed of terrorism. (Which is especially weird coming from someone who defended the Capitol riot.) It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize what could come from incitement like this.
It’s worth noting that the elevator meetup she describes never happened, nor was there a police officer running after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN); the joke was entirely made up (see story here). What did happen to two other trash-talking Republican House members (here and here) may be fueling her zeal to backtrack before she gets censured and thrown off her committees. (That would make three-for-three for Pelosi. She has the votes.)
Gosar, Greene, and Boebert (more or less in that order) are the bottom of the GOP barrel. Most other Republican members of Congress are better, or at least less worse, than they are.
Boebert is a first-termer from rural Colorado, and it looks like she’ll have a credible opponent in the 2022 GOP primary: A woman named Marina Zimmerman, a former military brat who works in construction and describes herself as a blue-collar conservative (see her campaign website here). Her campaign slogan: “Help me take out the trash.”
Now, referring to someone as “trash” is unkind. But Boebert is trashy. At the same event, she also cracked a “breastfeeding” joke about Pete Buttigieg and referred to Biden as “the piece of crap in the White House.” There you have vulgarity, homophobia, and anti-Muslim bigotry all packed into one deep breath and long exhale. She didn’t apologize for those other remarks.
Her audience kind of laughed, as you’d expect a Republican crowd to do, but not all that hard and you can hear the groans.
Our country is going through politically fraught times. Our communities need leaders who can calm the mobs, not stir them up with hate speech, which is what this was. Boebert has repeatedly demonstrated she lacks both the civility and intellectual firepower to do the job entrusted to her. The voters of her district made a mistake by electing her to Congress. Let’s see if they can do better next time.
https://youtu.be/GFmnPYJoV5k